Category
Causation
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Karma as moral causation: does the theory hold together?
The doctrine of karma says that actions have consequences for the agent that go beyond their visible effects, ripening in this life or future lives. It is shared, in different forms, by Hindu, Buddhist and Jain traditions. As an engineer I want…
Started by Arjun Iyer1 reply123 views -
Did Hume ever read al-Ghazali?
Last month I read al-Ghazālī's account of his crisis of doubt, and then went looking for more. I found the part of The Incoherence of the Philosophers about fire and cotton: we see the cotton burn when it touches the fire, but…
Started by Fajar Nugroho4 replies188 views -
Is Aquinas’s First Way really about a first moment in time?
Most of my friends assume Aquinas's arguments for God (Summa Theologiae I, q.2, a.3) are about the beginning of the universe: everything has a cause, so go back far enough and you find God at the start. But my lecturer says that's…
Started by Aoife Brennan4 replies194 views -
Reading group: Nagarjuna, Mulamadhyamakakarika chapter 1 (on conditions)
The Mūlamadhyamakakārikā opens with an examination of causal conditions (pratyaya). The first verse says that nothing arises from itself, from something else, from both, or without a cause. The chapter then examines the four types of condition recognised by the Abhidharma schools:…
Started by Meera Kulkarni4 replies236 views -
Al-Ghazali was right: causal necessity cannot be demonstrated
In the Seventeenth Discussion of The Incoherence of the Philosophers, al-Ghazali argues that the connection between what is customarily believed to be a cause and its effect is not necessary. When cotton touches fire and burns, observation shows only that the burning…
Started by Layla Haddad8 replies332 views -
Why does ‘the shape caused the door’ sound so wrong if Aristotle meant it?
I make cedar doors and ceilings in Tetouan, in the Andalusian style my father taught me. When I was an apprentice he explained Aristotle's four causes to me with a door: the cedar is what it is made of, the design is…
Started by Hicham Ouazzani4 replies132 views -
Anscombe was right: we see causing all the time
I make cedar doors and ceilings in Tetouan. When I push a chisel through cedar I do not see a chisel, then a cut, and infer a connection. I see the chisel cutting. When my apprentice drops a plank and it cracks,…
Started by Hicham Ouazzani6 replies234 views -
Correlation is not causation, I tell my team. But what exactly is the missing ingredient?
I build credit-scoring models for a mobile-money company in Nairobi. Our models find patterns: people who top up airtime at regular times repay loans more often. Everyone on my team can recite "correlation is not causation". Nobody can say what causation adds.…
Started by Wanjiru Kamau4 replies146 views -
Splitting causation from explanation was a modern mistake, not an Aristotelian one
I study kelp forests on the Chilean coast. I came to philosophy through Maturana and Varela, the Chilean biologists who described living things as self-producing systems in the early 1970s, and I keep running into the same problem. To explain why a…
Started by Ignacio Fuenzalida6 replies212 views -
The al-Ghazali–Hume parallel is shallower than the textbooks suggest
I teach comparative philosophy, and the sentence I most often have to correct in student essays is "al-Ghazālī anticipated Hume". I'd like to argue that the parallel, though real, is shallower than it is usually made to look. The shared step is…
Started by Kenneth Leung Chi-ho5 replies254 views -
Fire and cotton in the Seventeenth Discussion, read beside Hume’s Enquiry
I model oil reservoirs for a living, so causation is a practical problem for me before breakfast. I've been reading the seventeenth discussion of al-Ghazālī's Incoherence of the Philosophers (in Michael Marmura's translation) next to Section VII of Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human…
Started by Abdulrahman Al-Qahtani5 replies170 views -
Reading group: Nāgārjuna on causes and conditions, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 1, 20 and 24
For my MA in Pune I work on Nyāya–Madhyamaka debates, and the opening of Nāgārjuna's Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way is where those debates start. I'd like to read three chapters together. Translation. Jay Garfield, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle…
Started by Meera Kulkarni5 replies136 views -
Al-Ghazali and Hume make the same argument about fire. Why do they end up so far apart?
I teach history in Fes, and my students love the story that al-Ghazali "anticipated Hume" by six centuries. I tell it too. But the more I read, the less I think "anticipated" is the right word, and I would like help explaining…
Started by Youssef Benali4 replies222 views -
‘Illa, kāraṇa, gù: what each tradition’s word for ’cause’ lets it ask
I research classical Arabic philosophy in Beirut, and I've been thinking about how the translators of the ninth and tenth centuries handled Aristotle's aitia. They used 'illa and sabab, and here is the interesting part: 'illa already had, or soon acquired, a…
Started by Layla Haddad6 replies246 views